14 Answers

You have to open up the iphone as a drive. Not sure on Mac, but on Windows, go to your C drive and you’ll see it there. Then find the “photos” folder and drag them over. It’s like importing from a digital camera.

Bluetooth in iPhone is “on”. If you could walk me through that, great.

USB cable works fine, brand new, e.g. it’s charging the iPhone from the computer right now.

Image Capture shows a picture of the iPhone but then I had the impression that the images would just go ahead and load, like they do when you plug in a memory card. Must be my move now, but what move would that be?
I do have Dropbox as well as iPhoto, would that be of any use?

Turn on Bluetooth on the computer, and set your phone to be “discoverable”.
Use the computer to “discover” and connect to the phone.
Once connected, you should get a prompt to share data from one device to the other.
You can probably select all of the photos that you want to move at one go, then set the transfer to take place and let it run unattended.
Depending on how many photos you have, and their file size, the process could take a while.

I don’t know how Dropbox works with the iPhone, but if you can move the photos from the phone to the Dropbox folder (and assuming you already have Dropbox on the computer), then it should be simple enough to get the photos from Dropbox to the computer. (On Windows computers, they appear in the PC’s Dropbox folder automatically after time, when the connection is live.)

You can also use iCloud. Download the iCloud app to your iPhone and install iCloud on your computer (Mac or PC). Then note that you will have something called “Photostream” on both your iPhone and your computer. Any photo that you place into Photostream on your iPhone will automatically appear in your My Photo Stream folder on your computer. On Windows PCs, My Photo Stream will be a folder under iCloud Photos, which is under My Pictures. The nice thing about this is that your Photostreams on both machines will always be in sync, so it works in reverse, too. If you place any photo in the Photostream folder on your computer, it will automatically appear on your iPhone.

The drawback is that if you take a lot of pics, you will use up your data MB on your phone plan real fast.

It may help us better if you tell us which model and iTunes you are using.

I have “my photos” hooked up to iCloud so its automatic.

However, generally speaking when I connect my iPhone 4s to my MacBook Pro it typically picks that up and iTunes opens automatically, as well as iPhoto. Try opening iPhoto then connecting the USB and it may read it there. Let us know how it goes.

I had a similar problem with photos I had taken on my camera then put on my computer(a PC) then transferred to my iPhone. According to the apple store I couldn’t move THOSE pics to my other device. I needed to take them from my computer to the iPhone. I wanted to put them on my new Mac and they said that the photos somehow belonged to the PC. They hinted that their may be a hack but not an apple authorized way to do it.

My report: I asked EVERYONE. I asked the store I bought the iPhone from. Those assholes are always “busy helping another customer”. I asked the very nice young hipsters at the Mac store in the mall. They said I just had to try again. Finally I contacted AppleCare. Fabulous. The guy, who was Indian but refrained from calling me “ma’am” twice per sentence,
led me slowly and patiently through about 75 steps and determined that my operating system is too old to link to iPhone. This is why the Image Capture sequence never went forward. I’m buying Snow Leopard – paying extra to receive it in one day. Pretty sure this is going to fix more than one problem. I love you all for your help. Thank you, thank you, and thank you.